Nashville native completes research internship at Vanderbilt

RELEASED: March 15, 2007

DANVILLE, KY—Having already studied abroad in the Bahamas and taken innovative CentreTerm courses during her first three years, senior Jackie Deal of Nashville took advantage of another option offered to Centre students: completing an internship during CentreTerm, the College's distinctive and exciting three-week January term.

Deal, a biology and psychobiology double major at Centre, has worked in a science laboratory at Vanderbilt University for the past five summers, and this past January she completed a research internship in kidney protein function.

"The internship gave me another opportunity to work in the lab and get more and more experience," she says.

During her internship, Deal was able to learn new lab techniques and master material that built upon what she had learned at Centre.

"I actually felt like it was my very own project and that I really understood what I was doing," she says. "I got to put what I had learned in classes to use in real life."

While Deal has always been interested in the sciences, she started out at Centre wanting to major in a different part of the field.

"I wanted to major in chemistry until I took organic!" she says.

Deal's favorite class at Centre has been Freshwater Biology, in which she got to travel to different streams around Danville and study aquatic insects.

Outside of the classes required by her major, Deal's favorite class has been World Religion, which she found fascinating.

"I'd never learned about other religions growing up," she says. "It was like story time each time I went to class."

Deal hopes that all of her experience—both within the classroom and without—will help her get into graduate school after she graduates from Centre in May. She hopes to attend Vanderbilt's Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in the Biomedical Sciences (IGP) in the fall.

For more information on obtaining internships at Centre, check out the Career Services page.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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